Key to this strategy is to sync up disparate programs that are important to the network, but so far have not been integrated. The Army’s acquisition bureaucracy is organized to manage stand-alone widgets and weapons, not an interconnected mesh of systems.

“The network is now the Army’s highest modernization priority,” Chiarelli (Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, Army vice chief of staff) says. Having every soldier plugged into the tactical network and giving them means to access and distribute information would give the Army a “tremendous advantage that we never had before,” he adds.